


Sacred Simplicity

by BlueColoredDreams



Series: Superposition [2]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Cuddles, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-15 23:43:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11816682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueColoredDreams/pseuds/BlueColoredDreams
Summary: It might be a punishment, but it feels like a gift.





	Sacred Simplicity

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted the person Kravitz made a deal with to be Maureen SO BADLY. Obviously, of course, I'm biased. I whipped up this idea after ep67 and I just got really attached, and I wanted to put it out there before the finale happens! (Give Lucas back his mom, please???)  
> The song Maureen sings is [Eric's Song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK3C_VsxmHM) by Vienna Teng. Because I'm a giant sap and that means I'm obligated, at least once, to include someone singing in like, at least one fic per fandom. The end.  
> This is meant to be read alongside Quantum Entanglement, though it's not its 'canon' ending, and not a necessary read.

Being dead sucked.

Facing Death as an outlaw (again) sucks considerably more. She flickers, reduced down to the barest light of her soul in the formless darkness, facing the outline of something unfathomably large and many beaked. Feathers rustle like the sound of breathing in the darkness, stirring up a cold wind that cuts through the very essence of herself.

“So _yeah_ , maybe I deliberately took advantage of some chaos to uh, sneak away from Legion.”

The monstrous bird clucks a laugh at her, and then doubles, triples, quadruples in afterimages that make Maureen ache despite not having a body that can feel pain.  

It settles into a shape, a tall midnight-skinned woman in a feathered cowl, and she towers over the ball of light that was once the scientist Maureen Miller.  

“ _Maybe_ , how coy,” the Raven Queen laughs.

“Okay, so I _did_.”

“Took advantage of _some chaos_ , hm?”

“…I might have deliberately… taken control… and… Well, it sounds like you know exactly what happened! My son was in danger!”

The Raven Queen inclines her chin and suddenly Maureen is gasping. She lies on the marble floor of, of—somewhere. It’s dark, and it’s cold, and she gasps, pain raking down her throat as she tries to inflate flattened lungs with air, but she can’t—she can’t, and she claws at the cold stone floor, and she realizes she has _hands._ She has hands again, and they scrape against the floor, and she struggles to her hands and knees.

“Maureen Miller, it seems the Eternal Stockade is too good for you,” the Raven Queen tuts. “Three escapes in the six months you’ve been dead? No, no. _This will not do_.”

Maureen wants to touch herself, feel her body, but she still can’t manage a gasp of breath and there’s an overwhelming heaviness in the center of her chest where her heart should have been, and it _hurts_. It hurts, every single nerve is screaming from lack of contact between her system and her brain—she is dead, and her body registers that, and it’s sending a feedback loop to her brain, a constant wail of pain that screams _not right not right something’s wrong_ _you’re dying_.

A heavy cloak is draped across her shoulders, and it smells like upturned dirt, blood, smoke, and… and home, it smells like her _home_ —it smells like Faerun and being alive and all the things she forgot. She turns her head, and beside her is Kravitz, her jailer and her reaper, and the man who had to drag her by her metaphorical collar back to this place, when her family had been so close to her, so close and in such danger.

“Maureen Miller, I sentence you to a different set of shackles,” the Raven Queen starts, and Maureen feels the geas in her words, feels the tug on her dead, dead heart and in her flattened lungs and in every single nerve ending in her entire body. “Your time with your god as a druid is long past, your role as Istus’ emissary is through, and now, bondless, you seek to find those ties that were severed in death. But I am Death, and so shall you be, and I give you new bonds. Rise.”

Maureen gasps and her lungs fill with an audible liquid crackle, her ribs expand and the weight of her dead heart lifts, a small pulsing warmth that is a facsimile of a heartbeat. The pain ebbs and she is able to pick herself up, wrapping herself in the weight of Kravitz’ robe, the marble room spinning around her as she struggles with standing, legs weak and wobbling.

Her legs! Real legs, not steel and glass and magic—her mind struggles, head splitting as she tries to rectify the memory of dying, of living again, of the Hunger, and the Cosmoscope and the Stone—it’s easier now, now that all the planes know, but human minds are not built to die and live and die again, not without considerable magic, not without divine intervention, and this… Is this what this is?

“Intervention? Quaint. No, this is a punishment,” the Queen says.

She moves her hand and it is both a gesture and the flutter of a wing and Maureen has to close her eyes against the pain of reconciling the two images. “Since there is no other way to contain you, it seems. Maureen Miller, I sentence you to a millennia of service as my agent, as a Reaper. Yet, and yet… You and yours were favored by Istus herself, chosen to play a role in the battle that saved us all. You played a part, and you played it well. A century, then, of collecting souls like yourself. Death is impartial, and you must learn this as you are now Death.”

The pain eases, and she is whole.

Being dead sucked. Facing Death sucked.

Being Death... _well_.

Still not the ideal, but it was a hell of a lot better than before.

She has a body again, flesh and bone, if not blood. And she can see it all again, all of it stretched out like a net before her. She'd been granted her lucidity again in that single command, free to roam without fear of collapse.

She wonders if her DNA is the same, if she could fashion a real body for herself, switch her soul and…

“You’ll find that you can’t do that,” the Raven Queen says easily, lips curling in a grin that reveals gleaming white teeth. “There’s no physical essence at all in that body of yours. If you were to attempt any sort of necromancy at all, you’d not find the results pleasant. Speaking of… Dear Kravitz, warn those birds of yours that once is all they’ll get.”

“Yes, m’lady,” they both murmur, although Kravitz’s bow is significantly lower than Maureen’s.  She wasn’t overly courteous in life, so why should much change in death? It at least seems to amuse the Raven Queen when she barely dips her head, keeping her eyes locked firmly on the goddess.

She wonders if the Raven Queen realizes how much freedom this grants her, even though it’s being presented as a punishment.

“Maureen, step forwards.”

She does, tipping her chin up under the cool touch of the Raven Queen. She’s so impossibly tall; Maureen has never been a short woman, and still she has to look up and up and up. The Queen’s eyes are luminous and her smile chills Maureen’s spine, as cold as it already is.

“You will give up much in this sentence. For the freedom I see you will need in order for you to not chafe under my directions, I take the following from you: You will not have the powers my other Reapers possess. You can only wear your own shape, the shape you had before you died. You are mortal in battle—if you fall and fail to retreat to the Astral Plane to heal, you _will_ die, and you will be beyond saving, and you will go back to the Stockade to serve your millennia. If you fail a reaping and I find that you have willingly failed, your soul will be forevermore imprisoned in the deepest, darkest part of the Stockade, never to see the lights of the Astral Sea again. You will see and attend to your loves as they pass and die before you. You will guide their souls home to me. Do you accept these sacrifices?”

“I don’t find that they’re sacrifices at all,” Maureen says. “If this is what grants me the freedom to see my son, to see my lover, to walk among them again… then it’s not a sacrifice at all. I willingly give this to you, Your Highness. I am not saddened by this at all.”

“I am not mortal,” the Raven Queen says, tipping her head. “I do not love the way you do, though you are not precisely mortal any longer. If you find these conditions amenable, then perhaps I will see the end of your petty troublemaking, Maureen Miller.”  

The Raven Queen laughs again. “That said,” she continues as she reaches up and plucks a feather from her cowl, and presses it to the hollow of Maureen’s neck. “I will not be taking chances with you again.”

The feather burns white hot against the column of Maureen’s neck, and she gasps in pain. The feather shrinks, a chain snaking out from its shaft to wind around her neck, morphing into a necklace with a simple black feather pendant that rests against center of her neck.

“That will further restrain you,” she says in satisfaction. “The gods saved you and yours once. This is the second time, there will not be another.”

There is a beat of silence, and then the Raven Queen simply waves her hand and they are nothing but lights in the darkness once more.

She feels herself tremble in the confines of her soul—she’s aware now, of so much death passing them by. Occasionally, there are flickers of something wrong, little nudges like the sound of a bell against the fabric of her very being.

 _“Until next time_ ,” the light that is Kravitz says, and he winks out of existence.

She doesn’t feel particularly called to any of the chimes of discord around her, so she seeks the seam of the plane, and then—and then she’s in the woods. She is nothing but a will-o-the-wisp in the Wilds, and she concentrates. The skeleton comes first, her light filling the ribcage like a heart, suspended by nothing, but pulsing. And then the skin and sinew of her.

Her hands, thin and freckled and her wrists with the familiar jut of her ulna. Her hair falls in her face in dark waves, the silver blaze catching light out of the corner of her eyes. She has not had a body for nearly a year now, and she delights in reaching up to touch her cool face without the amused inspective gaze from the Raven Queen.

She sweeps her hair back off of her face, twisting it into a bun that she fastens with a twig. Clothes appear on her body, clean and crisp—a _pantsuit_ of all things, and a crisply white blouse with little heeled boots that aren’t appropriate for the woods, but she doesn’t really _need_ to walk anymore.

The Raven Queen likes snappy dressers, apparently, and the pantsuit is what comes easily when she thinks _clothes._ She wrinkles her nose, wondering how long it would take her to figure out how to summon her familiar sweaters. Maybe _Death_ doesn’t wear comfortable clothes, but she’s just Maureen Miller. Regardless of what she has to do to be that.

She doesn’t want to waste the energy figuring it out, so she takes off the heels and starts towards the lab where Lucas is.

The moonlight gleams off of the waterfall, sparkles against the rocks in ways she never saw when she was alive. She sees two silhouettes in the garden, and if the fact that her body is decaying so close by to where she treads is supposed to make her feel odd, it doesn’t because she’s _home_ and she can sense her son.

She just walks right through the door. No need to fuss with the mechanism or anything—she takes one step, and she’s in the Astral Plane, and then again, and she’s in the hallway.

What makes her feel odd is the state of the lab. It’s dirty, dingy, uncared for. It must have fallen in disrepair while they were away in the floating lab, and Lucas must not have bothered to clean it out. The lights flicker, in need of recalibrating and changing and cleaning. There are doors that haven’t even been opened, judging by the layers of dust on the hand scanners.  The scent of damp earth pervades the whole lab— damp earth and limestone and rot.

She expected some level of mess, simply because it’s Lucas, but she thought that maybe, he’d take a little better care—but, no, it doesn’t look like he’s cleaned in months. The kitchen is a pile of dirty dishes and a sour smell of dishwater. Trash litters the floor with balled up papers and books and odds and ends of robotic parts, gemstones, components, clothes.  There’s the evidence of building and tearing down and rebuilding everywhere.

She can follow the line of the mess back and forth from the kitchen to the bathroom to Lucas’ workroom. Everything else simply looks untouched, like he hasn’t bothered to go into any rooms but these.

Lucas is here, but she’s not sure that this is where he lives—or at least, he’s not bothered to turn this place back into a home. The whole place is just a glorified warehouse, a place where it looks like he’s stored parts and pieces as he works on something larger. Probably the absolutely absurd (but ultimately useful) mech he’d used during the Day of Story and Song.

She slips into his workroom, and finds the Cosmoscope—this, more than the cairn where he buried her, does something. It feels like her soul kicks in her chest, like a heart, and a black taste wells in her mouth. The thing that killed her. Right here. In front of her.

And now, she is Death incarnate.

She turns her gaze from it and surveys the room. Parts for a teleportation spell, sigils carved into the floor in a perfect circle, surrounded by junk. More dirty dishes. Every inch of space is covered with trash and detritus of work and living. Lucas is asleep, head on his desk with a thin blanket pulled over his shoulders, the parts and pieces of a new spell spilled out around him.

In the chaos of the apocalypse, she didn’t get a good look at him—just enough to know that he was safe, that he was alive, that he was being absolutely _ridiculous,_ and that she’d managed to deflect some of the worst damage from him so he could continue being her absolutely ridiculous, scruffy, obnoxious son.

He looks thinner than he was when she died, older. He’s grown a beard that she’s… not entirely sure how she feels about. Her gut instinct is to hate it. She hates the ponytail a little less, and the spell stringing out from his fingers is so intricate that he could almost be his father all over, asleep in the middle of making a spell no one’s ever seen before.

His glasses are cracked—she doesn’t know if it’s a new thing, or if he just never bothered to fix them after what happened during all the chaos of the Hunger. He’d done so much. He’d grown so much when she was gone, and she missed it. She missed it all.

She hadn’t meant to miss it all.

He scowls in his sleep, fingers twitching against the wire spooled out underneath his hands.

“My boy,” she says softly, reaching out to brush his long bangs from his face. “My baby boy…”

“Mom?” Lucas whispers in his sleep, face creasing further. “ _Mom_.”

“I’m here,” she answers, kneeling before him in in the mess around the room. “Lucas, honey.”

She cups her hands against his face, his mortal skin burning hot against her cold fingers. He opens his eyes slowly, dark and bloodshot. His lips part and he sighs softly, closing his eyes again. “Mom.”

“Lucas, I’m here.”

His eyes snap open, and he scrambles up, his chair squeaking backwards in his surprise. She still kneels, amused at his flailing reaction. She knows the smile on her lips doesn’t quite meet her eyes—her chest, where her heart should be, where her soul resides, aches too much for it to be full.

“M- _mom_?!”

“Hey, kiddo,” she says softly. She grins at him then, from the edges of her mouth to the corners of her eyes, joy spreading up and through her like her blood would have when she was alive, hot and rushing, a pounding in her chest as her soul alights with the realization that she’ll be there, now, to see him grow up and old.

(She doesn’t think about the after, although she can see the mortality radiating off of him like steam in the winter; she doesn’t think about that, she just thinks about the fact that she can see him, hold him, be there for him now, her body and mind whole and unbroken once more.)

He slips from his chair, landing on his knees before her. He reaches out and touches her cheek, then her hair, his hands scrambling forward. “How—how is this, how is this possible?”

“Magic, buddy,” she whispers. “Lots and lots of it.”

His hands find her neck, and she tips her head as he presses his fingers to the place where her carotid artery is. His face goes even paler, his glasses sliding completely off his face. Red blooms against his cheeks, tears welling up.

“You’re still dead, you’re _dead_ ,” he cries.

“I know, oh my Lucas, I know,” she says, reaching out to pull him to her. She cradles him close, petting his hair. She rocks him against her, holding him tight like she’s wanted to since the very second she realized she was _dead_ and he was left with the aftermath alone. “I know. But I’m here, it took so long, I’m so sorry.”

He sobs, thin shoulders shuddering violently beneath her. She feels his face against her neck and she lays her cheek against his head, settling back against the base of his desk, pulling him into her lap like he’s a child again. She hums to him, a soft lullaby until he calms enough to speak again.

“You died, and I couldn’t save you—and then, and then you, you left again and I was alone, Mom,” he cries.

“I said I’d see you later, y’know,” she says.

“I thought you meant like, when I fucking died! Not that you were—not that you were gonna, what are you?”

“Grim reaper,” she says. “Like in the lab.”

He nods listlessly, sniffling and hiccupping. He grips her blouse tightly, hands shaking against her. It feels like he’s just going to rattle apart.

“I haven’t,” he finally chokes out, “I haven’t been doing anything I shouldn’t be—no more necromancy.”

“I know, that’s not why I’m here,” she whispers, rubbing his back slowly.

“I fulfilled my promises,” he hiccups. “I lived through the end of the fucking world—why are you here? Am I _dying_? All that, just for, for what, am I gonna choke on a corn chip?”

“Not for a long time,” Maureen promises. “I just wanted to see you, I am so proud of you, Lucas, I’m so proud!”

There’s a flicker in the back of her mind, a silent hum of information and she rolls her eyes. “Also, if you’re going to do that in the future, you’re gonna get in trouble.”

“What?”

“Oh. Hm. Well, Lucas… No more necromancy. Period.”

“I just… what do _you_ know that I don’t?” Lucas asks her, leaning back to rub at his eyes. “Do you have like? Some infinite well of death information?”

“I don’t know, kiddo,” Maureen answers, pressing a cool kiss to his forehead. “This is pretty new. Just, uh, stay away from liches and I think everything should be A-okay!”

“You should do experiments,” Lucas says, and Maureen laughs. He smiles and hugs her even tighter. “You have to go, don’t you?”

“Not really,” she answers, laying her cheek against his head. “No. Not this time. Tell me what you’ve been up to, when you weren’t helping save the world.”

He clutches her tighter, laughing as he leans into her like a child, and Maureen whispers up a silent prayer to the Raven Queen.

 _Thank you, thank you, thank you_. _Let this be real, let this be permanent, let me stay here with him._

* * *

Leaving Lucas is hard, but after a few hours, she feels something tugging in her chest, and it becomes hard to hold her flesh. Lucas watches, brow pinched as her hand melts away into bone around a cup of tea and she bites her lip, hearing the chime of bells in her ears. The pendant against her neck begins to twitch, grow hot against her skin.

“Go, it’s okay,” Lucas says. His voice is quiet, but it’s even. He smiles softly and lets her nudge his cheek with her phalanges.

There’s maturity there that Maureen hates that he had to gain alone, without her, and in grief. But she’s not worried. If he cleans this place up, he’ll be _just_ fine.

“I’ll see you later,” Maureen promises. Her fingers burn and she knows suddenly what she has to do. She turns her back to Lucas and twists her wrists. A scythe billows into her hands, black obsidian and bone-white steel and she slices through the air and steps through the rift right into a dark room.

And though it breaks her heart, because oh, _oh_ , the necromancer is so young, so young and clumsy, and her hair is the same color as Lucas’ and she cries as Maureen towers over her, dark and aching and magnificent in the Raven Queen’s glory, because it was her love, oh, her lover died in the Day of Story and Song, and Maureen knows, she knows and she wants to grant mercy, but she cannot.

Her scythe makes a sound like the rush of wings as she severs the newly summoned soul from the constructed body, and then she kneels before the young woman and presses a kiss to her forehead. She whispers to her, words of comfort and of grief and grants her the knowledge that her love is safe in the Astral Plane.

And then the Raven Queen calls her back to court.

“Good work. I think I’ll be quite satisfied with your work.”

It was a test, and she has passed into the true favor of the Queen. Her compassion was weighed against her love, and her love weighed more, in the end.

It always had. There was never any doubt: Maureen had always done terrible, questionable things in the name of her heart, and this, the Raven Queen knew.

It had been a question of whether or not _Maureen_ knew. 

* * *

The price of victory was not as high as it could have been, Maureen knows, but people did die during the Day of Story and Song, and so many of them could not find their way through to the Astral Plane, so shocked and scared that the portal that Kravitz and Taako and her mirror had made in Phandalin was no more than a pinprick of light at midnight to them.

She and the other Reapers are busy, shuffling souls and tamping down the sudden flare of necromantic activity in the midst of so many deaths. Some are clumsy, young wizards and warlocks who lost someone; some of them are old and dangerous and taking advantage of those that were left behind. She is constantly paired with someone because the instinct given to them by the Queen can only go so far. Mostly, Kravitz gets stuck with her since _technically,_ he was her sponsor to the Queen. 

Often, they both catch each other looking up at the second moon, twin looks of wistfulness on their faces in the moments between battles and reapings.

He, at least, has the freedom to go. And he does, slipping away between assignments and after rushed explanations of how to file paperwork in a plane that very rarely uses corporeal forms.

She envies his freedom to just _go_.

Theoretically, she could. There are times where she _could_ go, where she could go up and visit and see her. But she’s scared. It’s not like going to see Lucas, where she knows that she was forgiven. The last time she saw her, she wasn’t herself, she was some ragged revenant of a woman, absent-eyed and jittery and fractured.

She said such terrible things. She raised her hand against her; against the woman she loved! She'd looked so small, then, fright and anger and betrayal on her stately face.

When she hadn't been replaying her death, over and over, Maureen had thought about that moment as she would rail against her bonds in the Stockade. The slump of shoulders, the clear chime of her ring against the metal workbench.

Ruthless. Cruel. Shortsighted. Power hungry. Loveless. Heartless. Monster. Abandoner. Brainwasher. Cultist. Liar. Murderer. Failure. Failure of a friend; failure of a mother; failure of a lover. Failure, failure, failure; doomed from the start; Pied Piper who would lead the whole world to its death with her voice alone.

No wife of mine.

And she had borne it all, tears drying on her face as the betrayal and pain ebbed away to a quiet acceptance. She simply straightened her spine and tucked her hands together at her waist as she fled from the scene and left the shell of herself in her wake, the woman she’d hated the most, that lofty, haughty tone of the Director.

“ _Okay,”_ she'd said and her voice had been so soft. So gentle. “ _Are you still going to strike me, Maureen? Because it's true, it's all true. And I deserve it. Go on, please.”_

She hadn’t been able to. She hadn’t hit her, but god, she’d wanted to. And it scared her so badly.

It has been three months since she’s been granted the freedom to go make amends, but…

She has to focus on her job. Or at least, that’s what she tells herself.

She steps over the wash of bodies in the dim cave; she feels lucky she doesn’t have to breathe. The scent would have been overwhelming. As it is, watery blood and muck seeps into the hem of her slacks and into the stupid little shoes she materializes in every time. Beside her, Kravitz remains a skeleton—but she has a _body_ and she’s going to use it.

“No one is here,” she says, eyeing the marble slab in the center of the cavernous room. Candles drip over its surface, flickering low and threatening to burn out. On the slab is a mass of flesh, misshapen and twitching. “We’ll have to track them.”

Kravitz’ eyeless skull surveys the scene. “You know what?” he says. “I’ve got this.”

“What?”

“This one is gonna be pretty cut and dry,” he says, his notebook materializing into his hand. He brings his hand up to his jaw, a mimicry of the movement he makes when he’s using an actual body, licking his thumb to turn the pages. “Obviously this is a circle, a new one. They’ll be taken in. No exceptions. I’ve got it.”

“But the Queen,” Maureen murmurs, touching the feathered pendant at the hollow of her neck.

“Will understand that a senior reaper took control of the situation as the bounty system has been currently suspended,” he says gently. He reaches out and puts a hand on her shoulder. “Go up and see them, whoever it is you’ve been wanting to see.”

Her mouth, despite not needing saliva, feels dry. She swallows on sympathetic memory alone, and she shakes her head. “I can’t.”

“Maureen, you broke the law so many times that you impressed the Raven Queen with sheer nerve alone. I actually think she would be disappointed if you _didn’t_ skip on a job to go see whoever it was,” he says softly.

“You know who it is,” Maureen murmurs. “I _know_ you do.”

Kravitz shrugs. “I was sworn to secrecy; also I’m pretty sure I’d get in trouble if I went blabbing. And uh… well. You understand that I _don’t_ want to be in trouble.”

Maureen thinks he'd be blushing if he was wearing skin.

She snorts, “What, your boyfriend scares you more than the Queen of Death Herself?”

“Less that I’m scared of him; it’s more like… he’s just even more intensely disappointed than She would be.” Kravitz tips his head to the side. “Go on. Go see her. You’ll be more help once you do, and you stop staring up at the moon and sighing.”  
  
“Hey! You do it too!”

“Yes, but I at least go see him,” Kravitz says patiently. He shoos her away; “Go on. It’s fine, you’ll know if it’s not.”

Maureen pinches the metal feather between her fingers. It’s cold, most of the time; she’s noticed, though, that it warms and tightens against her neck each time she’s given a new assignment. The fact that it rests, still cool, between her fingers means that the Raven Queen doesn’t mind much that Kravitz is taking control of the entire situation.

“Oh, alright,” she murmurs, watching as he raises his scythe and cleanly severs the magic circles set into the stone floor. Her own scythe slips easily from the ether into her palms and she steps forward as she opens up a rift, imagining the ever-elegant and organized office she’d built from the ground up.

She sees it in the rift like a reflection in water; she steps through to it, and then she’s there.

Lucretia’s office isn’t as pristine as it once was; chunks of the ceiling have fallen in, revealing the honeycombed crisscross of rebar and glass of the dome above, stars bright overhead. Books have been removed from shelves, and some are still littered upon the floor with the broken wood of shelves shattered in battle. Her desk has scorch marks on it, and it’s covered, literally covered, with paper an inch thick.

Forms and receipts and folders and reports. Damage assessments and letters stamped with the Sterling crest, entire folders with the red ink Brad uses to label important HR documents. Letters. Her letters—when… oh, when did she get _those_?

She picks up one, the thick paper trembling under her fingers.

 

> _Lucretia,_
> 
> _The Cosmoscope is nearly complete. And I am scared. I keep remembering how furious you were with me, and I wonder, but this is my biggest discovery and my biggest hope, that this can help us. That this can help you, and that we can reunite_ —

Maureen can't bear to read the rest. Can't bear to see the softened creases from where it has been folded, unfolded, re folded by Lucretia’s fingers. The way the ink blurs on the page from tiny water stains.

And there, and there, more and more under the detritus. The letters she sent on with Lucas, the letters she sent by magic when Lucretia was up here and she was down on the planet, securing Seekers and spies and information for her. The letters that she trashed, that Lucas must have found after her death. Here, here, and here. Her chest throbs wildly, because under it all, in a cracked-open journal is her name.  Her name, in Lucretia’s hand:  

 

> _Maureen,_
> 
> _If only I could have sent this before the worst…Oh, Maureen, I am so sorry, I should have never, never, never let this happen. I have so many regrets that keep me up at night, and this is one of them. This is the most devastating of them, the most undoable, the most… I could have stopped this, Maureen, this was senseless. Your death was senseless, unnecessary, unneeded, senseless sensless sensless. I wish, oh, why could it not have been anyone else in this world?_
> 
> _Despite it all, despite my mistakes and my failures and my distances, do not question that I loved you and Lucas with my whole heart. If I had the chance to say one thing, just one thing to you, it would be that. I loved you, and I love you still. I have so many loves that end in ‘still’, that I wonder, sometimes, if what you said was true: did I ever really love at all?_
> 
> _In the end, we are human. I should not have involved you, for this was my burden alone to bear, but I am human, and so I did. And I put too much weight on your shoulders, Maureen. I should not have._
> 
> _Would you still be alive, if I had not loved you?_

Maureen trembles, eyes flitting across the page, watching as Lucretia’s elegant cursive grows shaky and uneven and smeared across the page. She sees, in her minds’ eye, Lucretia hunched over this same desk, in the dead of night, writing this as she grieves alone.

She knows a little of what happened after her death—Lucas told her some of it, some of it she knew from her early attempts to escape the Astral Plane. She knows that Lucas cut her out, pared her away from his life like she’d urged him to do when she was sick and hurting. Maybe if she hadn’t, maybe if she hadn’t cultured such a vitriolic anger in him towards Lucretia for hurting her, maybe… Maybe she would still be dead, but maybe Lucretia wouldn’t have begged like this, put her pleas on paper as she begs a memory for forgiveness, for understanding, for something—anything that resembled absolution.

 

> _Oh, Mar, please don't have died trying to help me. Don't have died missing me. But please, don't have died thinking I used you._
> 
> _My Maureen, I am so sorry. I am so sorry. I could live for another one hundred years, as could you, and I would still say I am sorry, and that your light was extinguished far too soon._
> 
> _Still, with all my love,  
>  Lucretia_

Maureen folds the letter and tucks it into the pocket of her slacks, face cold and damp as she closes her eyes and takes an unnecessary breath. She sinks into Lucretia’s chair, folding her arms across the messy desk and lays her cheeks on her forearms, throat uncomfortably tight.

She’d spent so much time here, here in this ruined office. She helped design it, helped build the secret nooks and crannies and helped pull in the lopsided shelves that Lucretia refused to fix or part ways with, stood behind Lucretia’s chairs in those early days where she stayed to advise her, where she used her diplomatic knowledge and connections to get the Bureau off the ground (literally and figuratively), where she would sit and tease Lucretia as she worked, her wry smirk filling her with satisfaction as she kicked her feet out until Lucretia would have to reach out with one hand to touch her knee. Where she’d knelt in the foot space, cradling cupcakes to her chest on their anniversary, waiting for Lucretia to come in only to jump out and startle Brian into accidentally releasing tarantulas in the office. (Lucretia had worked in the cafeteria for weeks and had scolded both of them with frosting still on her cheek.)

The first few months it seemed like everything would be fine, and then… it just wasn’t. As Lucretia spent more time on base, Maureen spent more and more time in the floating lab, working on the Cosmoscope, and by the time they noticed, it was too late for them.

But that was then, and this is now.

This is a rare gift, to be given this chance again, and she’d almost wasted it, just like she'd wasted the last few months of her life. She will not waste this, she absolutely will not. So she waits, waits for Lucretia like she should have done all those months ago.

There, voices in the hall, followed by the clunk of the locking mechanism.

“And can one of you please get in contact with that _ridiculous_ boy and get him to tell us how to _actually_ remove those bracers?”

Her back is to her, shoulders straight but her hair is down for once, a mop of  curly white frizz pushed back by a blue and silver scarf that Maureen recognizes (as she was the one who bought it for her). She’s dressed so casually, too; Maureen hasn’t seen her dressed down in pants and a blouse since they still lived planet-side, and would sit on their bench in the garden, barefoot and drinking tea.

It's so familiar; it's _so_ nostalgic that she calls out without thinking:

“Did you try casting Dispel Magic?”

And Lucretia, god, Lucretia, without missing a beat, like it hasn't been two years since they'd occupied this space last, just shoots back in that way she always did:

“ _Yes_ , Maureen, we did, in fact ca- _ahh_ —?”

Lucretia’s voice drops and cracks as she turns, eyes wide as she faces her office. One hand flies to her mouth and the people behind her peer around her—Maureen tips her head, and she sees Avi and she waves at him. He gives a sheepish wave back, looking perplexed, and oh, there’s the little boy, Angus, too, whose face scrunches up as he adjusts his glasses.

“But did you try casting it on a slot higher than Lucas’?” Maureen asks lightly, leaning back in Lucretia’s chair.

“I—we, uh—Ma… Mar? Maur…? _Maureen_?” Lucretia croaks and Maureen can see her shake, a movement that starts at her hands and travels to the very coils of her hair. Her glasses slide down her nose held in place only by the gold chain around them, and Maureen smiles warmly.

“Yeah. That’s me.”

“We’re gonna… we’re gonna go now?” Avi tries, and Lucretia nods absently. Angus pats her hand awkwardly, shooting a furtive look back at Maureen even as he walks out.

The door closes behind them, and Lucretia presses her back against it, shaking her head slightly.

“…Magnus was right, I should be getting more sleep,” she mumbles to herself, one hand coming up to clutch at her hair as she continues to shake her head. “Starting now, I’m going to—I’m going to get some sleep, and… I—are hallucinations a sleep deprivation or trauma thing…?”

“Hello? Lucy, yeah? I’m right here. Sleep is good, but I’m not— you’re not hallucinating,” Maureen says gently, pushing away from Lucretia’s desk. “I’m here, I’m real.”

“You _died_ ,” Lucretia says faintly. She blinks rapidly, eyes shining with tears as she swallows and looks away from Maureen as Maureen steps forward over all the mess and detritus in the office. “Twice, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Well, the second time, I was technically still dead,” she says softly. She touches Lucretia’s cheek gently, brushing a cool thumb across the damp track of a tear, heat searing through her skin. “But… yes. I’m dead; I… I work as an agent of the Raven Queen, now.”

“So, I’m dying after all?” Lucretia whispers softly. She closes her eyes and her mouth trembles; “I… okay. I’m… okay with that, I guess.”

“No!” Maureen says sharply, cupping Lucretia’s jaw with both hands. “No, no, no, you’re not dying. I’m not here for that. I’m here because… Lucretia, I… I missed you, so much. I missed you and missed you and missed you, and then I died, and I couldn’t stay, and I’m so sorry.”

“You took Lucas from me,” Lucretia says, looking up at her with wide eyes; “You let me think I lost you both. You let them take him from me, taught him to think I’d… I sent… I know it looked like I would have—oh, why are you here? Why?”

“Lucy,” Maureen murmurs; “Lucy… I know… I know that we were going bad even before Lucas gave me the Stone, but… the things I said under the thrall, I hope you can forgive me. I hated dying knowing that you—that you thought I hated you, that Lucas hated you, that he was scared of you because of what I had done, what I had told him. I wasn’t… even then, I wasn’t right. I didn’t think about what it would do to you, to have him fake his death like that—I just thought about what would keep him _safe_.”

The _from you_ goes unspoken, but they both know it’s there, just like they both know that the space around them is filled with oxygen and nitrogen and all sorts of other gases.

Lucretia’s jaw trembles under her hands and she presses her forehead to Lucretia’s, their glasses knocking together.

“It was true,” Lucretia whispers. “It was true, Mar, I almost… I was shortsighted, I was leading everyone to their deaths, I was a control freak, I was—I was all those things, and more. I don’t know why everyone is just so—how can _you_ forgive _me_? I pushed you and Lucas into a corner, I _neglected_ you—Luke gave me your letters, Maureen… I, he only wanted the Stone to help you so you could, so _we_ could…”

Her voice shakes and dies and she brings her hands up to cup Maureen’s elbows, then she slides them up to grasp her shoulders. 

“Mar, I wish I did better for you,” she whispers. “You never should have had to feel like a Relic was the answer—you should have never had to die.”

“And you should have never had to be alone,” Maureen whispers. “I came back, and we… We can try again. It’s a chance, it’s a _gift;_ the Raven Queen gave me a gift, and I can’t begin to fathom why, but I know that, for what it’s worth. But I forgive you, of course I forgive you, I forgave you a long time ago.”

Lucretia’s hands slide to her back and she grips the silk of her blouse and bows her head forward, shoulders shaking as she sobs against Maureen’s chest. Maureen sits slowly, pulling Lucretia to her just like she did Lucas, rocking her against her chest as she hums to her.

It’s an old, old habit now, returned to her with her body and lucidity. So many nights and mornings and idle afternoons were spent pulling Lucretia into her arms and singing, with plaiting her hair and rubbing the tension from her wrists and shoulders and neck.  With Lucretia singing with her, a quiet descant against her voice.

_“Of course I forgive; I’ve seen how you live,  
Like a phoenix your rise from the ashes…”_

Lucretia snorts, indelicate and messy and Maureen doesn’t care about the snot on the Raven Queens’ fancy summoned silk blouse, because this is all that matters. She smiles and her voice wavers just a bit with her answering laugh.

“That old song?” she asks against Maureen’s clavicle, even as her breath shudders and her entire body heaves with a sob.

 _“Of course I forgive, you’ve seen how I live_  
_I’ve got darkness and fears to appease,_  
_My voices and analogies,_  
_Ambitions like ribbons, worn bright on my sleeve—”_

She remembers singing this, years ago, their hands clasped together as they spun on the packed-dirt clearing. Remembers working with the lyrics, explaining it and hashing it out as Johann—oh, poor Johann—noted it carefully down for them. As he turned Lucretia’s flowery prose and Maureen’s stumbling bluntness and science into something beautiful for their wedding day, a sung version of their vows, something just for them.

She pushes back an errant curl, pressing her lips to Lucretia’s temple, her skin burning hot with life, her pulse rapid under her lips.

Lucretia sighs and turns her head, pressing her face to Maureen’s neck, whispering along as Maureen falls into a quiet hum.

 _“Acknowledge the past,_  
_As lessons exquisitely crafted_  
_To carve us as instruments that play the music of life—”_

Once upon a time, Maureen said that Lucretia was ruthless, that her determination to do whatever it took, to sacrifice whatever she had to, the ends she would go to achieve her goals scared her witless.

But she thinks of the people she’d looked in the eyes recently, the tear-stained faces and the gnarled old hands of necromancers, and all the stories that tugged at the edges of her heart even as she swung her blade down across their bodies.

She is ruthless too; she has always been. They have always been a pair, her and Lucretia: A pair of women who were twisted and tempered into steel by the hardships and horrors in their lives, by the Relics; two women who saw the threats to their families and would protect them even if it tore the flesh from their bones.

“How swiftly we choose it,” she murmurs against the crown of Lucretia’s head. She traces one hand down Lucretia’s arm and tugs gently. Lucretia draws her hand back and Maureen laces their fingers together, pressing them against Lucretia’s sternum.

Lucretia squeezes her hand tightly, feeling the thud of her own heart against her cheeks, in her ears, against the flat of her hand. “Are you… are you gonna stay this time?” she whispers.

“I’ll be busy, and called away, and I mean, Lucy, hon, I’m dead,” Maureen murmurs.  

“And I’m a hundred and fifty-something year old extraplanar alien,” Lucretia says, rolling her eyes. “If anything, I’ll get shit for stealing Taako’s thunder with the Grim Reaper thing.”

Maureen laughs and kisses Lucretia’s forehead, cupping her cheek and chest, smiling so wide that she almost feels the burn in her muscles. “Gods forbid,” she whispers. She leans forward, lips brushing up against Lucretia’s for the first time in… oh, god, when was the last time she had kissed her? It hurts to even think about how long it’s been.

Lucretia’s breath hitches, and it’s just as cute as it always had been, and—

“ _Hey Barry’s chatting Nerdlord up and I’m super extra bored—ooooh, did not realize you were **busy-** busy.“_

Maureen sits upright, eyes wide and her death senses screaming. “Lucretia there is a lich sticking its head through the door. Her? Her head? Skull—Lucretia. The fuck?”

“Oh, hush, you should know Lup by now? You know, from the Story?” To her credit, Lucretia doesn’t look the least bit phased that her wife is now a skeleton, but she does look a little irritated as she looks over her shoulder. “Lup. Really, _knock_.”

The red robed skull sticks an equally-skeletal lich hand out from the wall and waves. “ _Is this plane just crawling with Reapers, or what, Lucy? Taako’s gonna be ticked; he had a **monopoly**.” _

“Lup, can you uh… give me the room?”

 _“Boo, fine_. _Go get it on, I guess. Don’t mind me, dying another death of boredom.”_

“Thank you, Lup.”

Maureen takes a moment to put her flesh back on, shaking the tingling out of her hands that summons her scythe up to her. “You… Is Kravitz going—is he gonna handle that, because I **_don’t_** want a part in that.”

Lucretia wipes her eyes and laughs and shrugs helplessly. “I don’t even know what’s happening anymore, honestly?”

“That’s par the course, honey.”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“C’mon. Wanna walk around the base and spook the old members?”

Lucretia laughs again, and Maureen soaks up it up like a flower opening up to the sun.

“Sure,” she says, shaking her head fondly. “Oh, also Maureen? For the love of the gods, tell Lucas to answer me when I call him, we _have_ to get those bracers off.”  


End file.
